I snitched on my co-worker to my boss.

The background story:

I just got my current job in November of last year, as an IT engineer. My department is a really small one, only two IT engineers, 2 technicians, and my boss.

Though my position is IT Engineer, I am more focused on Web Development, so by January my co-worker approaches to me and says, “You know they are going easy on you? The boss is not giving you the same amount of work they used to give to the guy who was here before you.”

Yep, that hurt, for many reasons—chiefly by being under-valued for the simple fact of being a woman, as well as for being new to the enterprise. I decided I wasn’t going to have any of that. I was going to demonstrate to him and (mostly) to my boss that I didn’t need any special treatment, and that I could be as good as the guy who was before me. So I started a dynamic programming project, which consists basically of a platform that makes my life easier when it comes to developing demos, creating new apps, creating CRUDS, reports, etc etc… in summary, my program was like a small personalized wordpress, filling my needs and the needs of the requirements people would ask me.

People started noticing this project, since I was creating reports 3 times faster and prettier than the old guy, releasing brand new/renovated apps in less than 1 month, all because I had this “template of templates” helping me. By June of this year, my co worker approaches me again, telling me the same freaking thing: “You still don’t truly belong to the company, because they are still going easy on you”

That was it. I had already released 3 FULL SYSTEMS implemented globally, migrated lots of shitty reports and applications that made me travel in time and feel in the 90’s, so I breathed slowly, calming myself down and sent an email to my boss while also forwarding the message to him, which went something like this:

“Hi Boss, this email is to let you know I’m tremendously alarmed by the feedback I got from my coworker this morning, he said to me in front of a provider that you were being acquiescent with me, and therefore I wasn’t preforming all the tasks I should have been doing by this time. I just want to know the reason of this, because if I applied to this job and if you hired me, I think it’s because I can do the tasks related to it, so I don’t see what would make you think I can’t bear the whole responsibility. For some background, this topic was already touched upon in January of this year with the same output, that you were going easy on me, and I used this feedback to my favour to get more focused and try to give more, but since I see that didn’t worked, and my co-worker still tells me you are making this special treatment to me I decided to talk straight about it. Regards!

So obviously I knew this was all my co-worker’s jealousy or God knows what, but I played dumb, and it worked perfectly! My boss replied that he didn’t know the basis of my co worker’s comments and that he was more than satisfied with my performance, and that in fact I had done way more than the old guy in way less time… =)

I guess you don’t need to yell at somebody to give them a slap in the face!